Kauai Tales

Most people, when they travel to exotic lands, collect knick-knacks such as clothing items or useless objects that soon are retired to a drawer and completely forgotten. I prefer to buy language-themed items, which is how I have come to own many Teach Yourself Language X books and dictionaries over the years. This time, when I went to Kauai with my family, I was looking around an antiques and Hawaiiana store in a Hanalei and discovered a book of Kauai legends and folktales. I already owned a Hawaiian dictionary (which I had forgotten, oh so foolishly, to bring with me to Kauai) and a book on the better-known Hawaiian legends, such as Maui and Pele, so I was excited to obtain a book with more provincial legends.


What particularly appealed to me about Kauai Tales was the glossary in the back that explained the meaning of the names in the stories. It pleased me not only as a practitioner of the "secret vice", but also as a student of myth and legend. The names in such stories, unless they are drawn from a historical person, are not chosen randomly; knowing the meaning of the name, therefore, illuminates the point of the story and may yield cultural information otherwise hidden. Many of the stories in Kauai Tales are aetiological, spanning form the time of night before the colonization of the Hawaiian islands to semi-historical periods. The author-collector is very careful to point out that this is a collection of stories from story-tellers, rather than genealogist-historians, and is intended to entertain first and be useful or historically accurate secondarily.

I devoured the tales in the first book so quickly that I returned to the shop to purchase the other two collections. The shop was still there, since it wasn't magical, and a book that appeared in the back of an antiques shop did not seem the sort of literature which would be easy or possible to find on a return voyage (I'm still kicking myself for not picking up the Adam Link collection in Many Waters bookstore in Northfield).

The second volume, Polihale, unfortunately lacked the comprehensive language index of the first volume, but it contained much more material. Now that I have returned home, I have access to my Hawaiian reference material. Much of Polihale appears to be derived from an Kauai oral epic involving several characters in a war between the chief of Kona (yes, the coffee place) and the chief of Wailua, near the sacred birthing stone of the chiefly class. It reminded of the Iliad and Odyssey, in that the cycle contained an overarching war narrative, personal narratives (from both sides), aetiologies, and stories about the aftermath of the war (involving a were-octopus).

I have not read the third yet, but I am looking forward to it.